Hundreds of thousands of federal workers went unpaid Friday as the government shutdown enters its 24th day, and the U.S. sends an aircraft carrier strike group to Latin America.
As hundreds of thousands of federal workers went unpaid Friday during the 24th day of an agonizing government shutdown, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called on House Republicans to return to Washington to negotiate a bipartisan agreement.
“We need Republican support for a bipartisan path forward in order to get out of this situation,” Jeffries said Friday during a news conference at the Capitol.
“I said this directly to the president with (House Speaker Mike) Johnson and (Senate Majority Leader John) Thune right next to me,” Jeffries said, referencing a White House meeting in late September to avert the current shutdown. “This does not get resolved until you decide to give permission to Republicans on Capitol Hill to negotiate a bipartisan resolution.”
House Republicans have been in recess since Sept. 19 after passing a stopgap funding bill to keep the government open through Nov. 21. That bill has repeatedly failed in the Senate as Democrats demand an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that will otherwise expire at the end of the year.
The federal government has been closed since Oct. 1, when Democrats and Republicans in Congress failed to pass legislation that would fund it for the 2026 fiscal year. Hundreds of thousands of essential federal workers are now working without pay while others are furloughed.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked a Republican bill called the “Shutdown Fairness Act” that would have allowed pay for air traffic controllers, military troops and other essential federal workers the Office of Personnel Management has approved while the government is shut down.
“Deranged Democrats just blocked our bill to pay essential workers who keep Americans safe. Why? They believe that forcing Americans to work without pay gives them leverage,” Senate Republicans wrote on X after the failed vote.
On Friday, Jeffries reiterated a point he has made multiple times since the shutdown began.
“We’re prepared to support any bipartisan legislation that comes out of the Senate that is designed to decisively address the Republican health care crisis, reopen the government and enact a bipartisan spending agreement that actually makes life better for the American people,” he said.
Jeffries refuted the idea that Democrats bear responsibility for any lasting fallout from the shuttered government and pushed back on the Republican contention that their stalled funding bill continues spending levels approved during the Biden administration.
He said the spending levels the Republicans would like to extend are based on the Republican stopgap funding bill Congress passed in March to keep the government running through the end of September. That bill cut $13 billion for domestic programs, including Medicaid.
“We’ve made clear we will not support a partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the health care of the American people,” Jeffries said Friday. “We’ve been saying that for six weeks. We have not moved off our position.”
Neither have Republicans, who insist the government must reopen before any negotiations can happen.
“It’s becoming clearer by the day that Democrats don’t want an outcome, they want a political issue,” Thune wrote on X on Friday. “They’ve refused to reopen the government — 12 times. They’ve refused my offer to discuss Obamacare’s failures. They’ve refused my offer to hold a vote on their own proposal to address a problem they created. They’ve refused to pay the troops and federal employees who are working without a paycheck. The only thing they’ve said yes to? The Schumer Shutdown and political ‘leverage.’”
The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier strike group to the waters off South America, in the latest escalation and buildup of military forces in the region, the Pentagon announced Friday.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a social media post.
The U.S. military has conducted its 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, Hegseth said earlier Friday, blaming the Tren de Aragua gang for operating the vessel and leaving six people dead in the Caribbean Sea.
In a social media post, Hegseth said the strike occurred overnight, and it marks the second time the Trump administration has tied one of its operations to the gang that originated in a Venezuelan prison.
The pace of the strikes has quickened in recent days from one every few weeks when they first began to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people since September. Two of the most recent strikes were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.
In a 20-second black and white video of the strike posted to social media, a small boat can be seen apparently sitting motionless on the water when a long thin projectile descends, triggering an explosion. The video ends before the blast dies down enough for the remains of the boat to be seen again.
Hegseth said the strike happened in international waters and boasted that it was the first one conducted at night.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in the post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”
Ybeth Bruzual, Holly Gregory, Asher Wildman, Jason Delgado, Spectrum News Staff, Associated Press
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